Today's enterprises that must swiftly and decisively react to demands for data due to regulations, legal entanglements, or for matters requiring precise, select business intelligence data. Among other things, today's enterprises often require strategic targeted information deployment that enables precision situational awareness during evolving tactical events requiring rapid and decisive action. When the need for such information arises, the information needs to be identified and provided to the locations and persons who require it without a fog of extraneous information.
The distinction between the three terms—data, information and knowledge is relevant to establish a common understanding of terms and concepts used in knowledge control. First, data represents facts, parameters or statistics that can be analyzed to produce information. Information is data related to a particular context that creates meaning. In other words, data represents facts and becomes information when embedded in a context of relevance to a recipient. In contrast to data that can be characterized as a property of things, knowledge is a property of agents (people or computer systems) predisposing them to act in particular way in circumstances defined by the context.
Knowledge Management (KM) is about the protection, development and exploitation of knowledge assets. KM encompasses theories, models, processes and tools that support the efficient and effective evaluation, acquisition, dissemination, development and exploitation of knowledge resources in organizational processes and decision making.
Knowledge engineering is the use of information assets regarding situations, users, products and technologies that an organization owns (or needs to develop as part of its strategic plan) and then uses to implement organizational processes efficiently and effectively.
Knowledge Engineering Systems and Tools provide the means of combining individuals' knowledge in the pursuit of personal and organizational objectives. In the simplest form, knowledge engineering supports person-to-person and group-to-group communications resulting in the development of new knowledge via integration. These more advanced computer collaboration and data sharing methodologies can create a level and quality of exchange not normally achievable within the conventional data-sharing environment.
Enterprises are caught in the middle of explosions with respect to government regulations, litigation, and data to be managed, all of which are occurring simultaneously. These intertwined issues require a level of knowledge, information and data management not formally required for day-to-day business at a company. In order to meet these challenges, a company must utilize resources at their highest efficiency and select tools to readily manage, engineer and integrate the data of the enterprise into a knowledge solution. The present invention addresses shortcomings in existing knowledge management solutions, and provides today's companies with tools useful for overcoming current knowledge management challenges.